Castine, Maine

“ These expeditions were such a drain on Maine’s population that Massachusetts was called upon to send men to garrison the little forts that protected the homes left defenceless by men who had gone to the front. During the War of Independence, the town of Falmouth (now Portland) , which had ardently resisted the claims of the British, was bombarded and burned, in 1775; in the same year Benedict Arnold followed the course of the Kennebec and Dead rivers on his expedition to Quebec; and from 1779 to 1783 a British force was established at Castine. ”

“ The greater part of New Brunswick, the northern half of Maine, and adjacent parts of Canada, not to mention the northeastern part of New York and other tracts farther off, are still covered with an almost unbroken pine-forest.
But Maine, perhaps, will soon be where Massachusetts is. A good part of her territory is already as bare and commonplace as much of our neighborhood, and her villages generally are not so well shaded as ours. We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man. ”

“ On the coast of Maine, where many green islands and salt inlets fringe the deep-cut shore line; where balsam firs and bayberry bushes send their fragrance far seaward, and song sparrows sing all day, and the tide runs plashing in and out among the weedy ledges; where cowbells tinkle on the hills and herons stand in the shady coves—on the lonely coast of Maine stood a small gray house facing the morning light. All the weather-beaten houses of that region face the sea apprehensively, like the women who live in them. ”

“ Oh, take me back home to my Old State of Maine!
From Katahdin’s proud crest, to Atlantic’s blue verge,
New lights and new scenes in succession emerge;
Silver lakes and green meads, in confusion arise
In grand panorama to gladden our eyes.
I love the old ingle, each nook, rock and knoll,
And the country’s dear flag that waves over the whole;
Take me back to the home of my youth once again,
To the dear Pine Tree State,—the Old State of Maine.
{7}
ALL THINGS SPEAK OF GOD
The stars in their infinite beauty,
And the moon in yon azure deep ”

“ Who that sees one bound outward, with her white breasts swelling and heaving, as if with a reaching expectancy, does not feel his own heart swell with a longing impulse to go with her to the far-off shores? Even at dingy, crowded wharves, amid the stir and tumult of great cities, the coming in of a ship is an event that never can lose its interest. But on these romantic shores of Maine, where all is so wild and still, and the blue sea lies embraced in the arms of dark, solitary forests, the sudden incoming of a ship from a distant voyage is a sort of romance. ”

“ The pure and worthy motives of the liar here
in Maine.
His strongest hold is fishing, and he fixes with
his eye
The victim who must listen and who never
dares deny.
Each river and pellucid pond, each brooklet and
each stream,
Possesses fifty liars to preserve it in esteem.
And he that owns a yaller dog, and he that
owns a hoss
Will never see their laurels dimmed, if words
can add a gloss.
’Tis true the old inhabitant, narrating ancient
tales,
Occasionally soars to heights where homely
language fails. ”

“ It does not make Maine less, but the spectator more, and that is a useful moral result. Maine's face, thus exposed, has almost no features: there are no great mountains visible, none that seem more than green hillocks in the distance. Besides sky, Katahdin's view contains only the two primal necessities of wood and water. Nowhere have I seen such breadth of solemn forest, gloomy, were it not for the cheerful interruption of many fair lakes, and bright ways of river linking them. ”

“ Through this steel riddle, more or less coarse, is the arrowy Maine forest, from Ktaadn and Chesuncook, and the head-waters of the St. John, relentlessly sifted, till it comes out boards, clapboards, laths, and shingles such as the wind can take, still perchance to be slit and slit again, till men get a size that will suit. Think how stood the white-pine tree on the shore of Chesuncook, its branches soughing with the four winds, and every individual needle trembling in the sunlight,—think how it stands with it now,—sold, perchance, to the New England Friction-Match Company! ”

“ During the period we are now discussing, the history of Maine was the story of confused grants of territory and of the planting of small isolated farming, fishing, and trading communities. The existence led by the inhabitants, in their solitary shacks or little villages, was that of a rough border life in which the monotony of the hard, bitter winters, and the routine of planting, fishing, or bargaining for furs, was punctuated by an occasional murder among themselves, and by quarrels, sometimes bloody, with the Indians and the French. ”

“ I could name the State of Maine—a name, for more reasons than one, familiar and agreeable to Missouri, and whose pristine territory was sold by Sir Ferdinando Gorges to the proprietors of the Massachusetts Bay, for twelve hundred pounds, provincial money. And well it was for Maine that she was so sold; well it was for her that the modern policy of waiting for the rise, and sticking at a minimum of $1 25, was not then in vogue, or else Maine would have been a desert now. Instead of a numerous, intelligent, and virtuous population, we should have had trees and wild beasts. ”

“ Of men whose hands are blistered by the
scythe-snaths and the plows,
—For men who wrestle Nature with their bare
and corded arms
In an everlasting struggle with these grudging
old Maine farms,
Who lay their lives and hopes and joys’neath
labor’s bitter rule
To coax from sullen Earth the price that keeps
their boys in school.
In manhood of America—’mongst brawn and
pluck and brain,
Set high these humble heroes of the upland
farms of Maine! ”

“ There it was, the State of Maine, which we had seen on the map, but not much like that,—immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, that eastern stuff we hear of in Massachusetts. No clearing, no house. It did not look as if a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking-stick there. Countless lakes,—Moosehead in the southwest, forty miles long by ten wide, like a gleaming silver platter at the end of the table; Chesuncook, eighteen long by three wide, without an island; Millinocket, on the south, with its hundred islands; and a hundred others without a name ”

“ The message to the dear old home up there in
Maine.
The penmanship is rounded, schoolboy style,
For mother’s eyes are getting dim, she wrote;
And as he sits and writes there, all the while
A bit of homesick feeling grips his throat.
For all the city friendships here with Tom and
Dick and Jim
And all the ties of later years grow very, very
dim;
While boyhood’s loves in manhood’s heart rise
deep and pure and plain.
Called forth by mother’s homely words from
up in Maine. ”

“ THE SUN-BROWNED DADS OF MAINE Here’s ho for the masterful men o’ Maine,
—Grit and gumption, brawn and brain!
South they go and West they flow,
The men that do and the men that know.
And Fame and Honor, Power and Gain
Come to the call of the men o’ Maine.
But away up back on the rock-piled farms
Are the gnarled old dads with corded arms,
The dads that give these boys o’ Maine
Health and strength and grit and brain. ”

“ Lying under cold snow-white sheets, with jealous neighbors, the French settlers of Canada and Acadia, ready to put pins in the youngster and keep her crying, and if possible to stunt her growth, Maine was longest in her cradle of any of the infant settlements. As early as 1602 some Frenchmen landed on her coast, but only remained long enough to make a few eyelet-holes in that watery frill which the busy but chill fingers of the Atlantic has wrought upon her eastern hem. ”

“ In Massachusetts alone are the delightful Nantasket and Revere beaches, elegant Nahant, and the myriad of charming nooks from Cape Ann to Provincetown. Then the Berkshire hills; Lenox and Stockbridge, and other equally beautiful towns, but with less pretensions to aristocracy; the lovely valley of the Connecticut, the romantic Deerfield and the pleasant Franklin hills. In Maine, beginning with Old Orchard, perhaps the finest beach on the Atlantic coast, what delightful harbors and islands there are. And in the Maine woods there is a wealth of health and sport. ”

“ Cleverly is a very staid, respectable, triangular township on the coast of Maine, its southern, or sea line about six miles in length, forming the base of the triangle, with a small village—Foxtown—at its eastern point, and a somewhat more pretentious town—Geeseville—at its western point. From these two places the division lines ran, one north-east, the other north-west, meeting on Rogue’s River, where a bridge makes the apex of the triangle. ”

“ Owing to the behavior of my double, or, if you please, to that public pressure which compelled me to employ him, I have plenty of leisure to write this communication.
I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian [pg 173] connection. I was settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one of the finest water-powers in Maine. We used to call it a Western town in the heart of the civilization of New England. A charming place it was and is. A spirited, brave young parish had I; and it seemed as if we might have all "the joy of eventful living" to our heart's content. ”

“ But there’s savor in wreaths from the brier and
cob,
In the depths of the forest afar from the mob;
And an incense that’s sweet to ecstatic degree
Curls up from the bowl of the ancient T. D.
While choicest Perfectos smell ranker than
punk
In the shade of the hemlocks of Sourdnahunk.
Ah, here do the tables most wondrously turn!
The city olfactories sniff if you burn
Aught else than the finest Havana in rolls;
Folks turn up their noses at cut-plug in bowls ”

“ In the yard and around the door stood men, gathered in small knots, engaged in low, earnest conversation; while, every few minutes, some were seen issuing from the house and hastily departing, as if dispatched on special messages,—the company in the mean time being continually augmented by fresh arrivals of the settlers, who came straggling in from both directions of the great road, which, leading from the more thickly-settled parts of Maine to the Connecticut, here passed over the Androscoggin. ”

“ A hundred miles through the wilds of Maine
You soon may ride on a railroad train.
Some Yankee hustlers have planned the scheme
To take the place of the tote-road team.
They have the charter, the grit and cash
To stretch their tracks to the Allegash.
Along the length of the forest route
The woodland creatures will hear the hoot
Of the bullgine’s whistle, where up to now
The big bull moose has called his cow.
And old Katahdin’s long fin-back
Will echo loud with the clickity-clack
Of wheels that merrily clatter and clash
Through the sylvan wastes toward the Allegash. ”

“ We wait for that melody up here in Maine,
—’Tis the song of the harrow and plow.
They are picking rocks in Oxford, and in Waldo
blasting ledge,
And they’re farming down in Lincoln on their
acres set on edge.
Down among the kitchen gardens of the slopes
of Cumberland
They’re sticking in the garden sass as thick as
it will stand.
And every nose is sniffing at the scent of fur-
rowed earth,
And every man is living all of life at what it’s
worth. ”

“ The second winter was as severe as the first, and quite discouraged the colonists, who could get very little to eat, as their storehouse had been burned by the Indians; and so when spring came and they had a chance to leave Maine they all went back to England, and the settlement of Maine by the English was given up for many years. The next attempt to settle this coast was made by the French, who, not satisfied with claiming Acadia and Canada, wanted also to get possession of Maine, which had been so often described as a good place for settlement. ”

“ If all the Governors had known each other, and if all the people of different sections had been known to each other, or had been thrown together in business or social communication, the fact would have been recognized at the outset, as it is to-day, that there are just as good men in Maine as there are in Texas, and just as good men in Texas as there are in Maine. Human nature is everywhere the same ”

“ Here the town slopes down to the river of its own name on both sides, and the castle, instead of crowning either height, rises immediately above the stream. Eight years does much in the way of building up as well as of pulling down; and we may note that since we made an almost casual reference to Mayenne in231 1868, [69] the eastern part of the great church, a building remarkable rather for a strange and picturesque outline than for any strict architectural beauty, has had its choir rebuilt on a vast scale after the type of a great minster. ”

“ Her prayers and pious exhortations were supposed to have been the cause of the conversion of many young people in the place. Notwithstanding that the unchristian feeling of caste prevails as strongly in Maine as anywhere else in New England, and the negro, commonly speaking, is an object of aversion and contempt, yet, so great was the influence of her piety and loveliness of character, that she was uniformly treated with the utmost respect and attention by all classes of people. The most cultivated and intelligent ladies of the place esteemed it a privilege to visit her cottage ”

“ It is doubtless a repetition of the history of many other townships, but we, its citizens, have a local pride in its beauty, its bounty, its prosperity, its boundless hospitality. No finer cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, and poultry can be found on the face of the earth than are raised in Maine township. The physical, moral, social, intellectual, and financial condition of the people is on a high plane, and shows a steady growth and development through all the years since the first settlement. ”